Francesco Tinto, Kraft Heinz Co.’s chief information officer, says it can, if you invest in the right technology.

Tools powered by artificial intelligence, he says, can identify waste, inefficiencies, and areas ripe for trimming in manufacturing, supply chains, sales, and even IT departments themselves. Likewise, robots can be used to ramp up efficiencies in the production process, he said.

“We take only these two spaces, but go very deep,” he told CIOs and other senior IT managers here at Gartner Inc.’s annual IT industry conference Tuesday. “That is our bet.”

Mr. Tinto two years ago became global CIO of the company formed by the merger of food industry giants Kraft and Heinz in 2013. He was previously a senior IT manager at Kraft for more than a decade.

It’s not the only food company struggling amid changing consumer tastes and habits. Kel­logg, maker of Frosted Flakes and Pringles, last month said quar­terly sales fell 2.5% to $3.19 bil­lion, in­clud­ing a 2% drop in North America.

It requires department heads to justify all expenses for each new period, meaning every function or project is continually re-evaluated for needs and costs, as new budgets are hashed out for the next cycle.

“ZBB says last year is gone and we start from scratch, from the bottom up, and try to understand the cost of running the company,” Mr. Tinto says.

That can make investing in projects without clear, near-term results difficult, especially in the area of technology.

But it also instills discipline and focus, he says.

Mr. Tinto said over the past year he focused spending on artificial intelligence and robotics, two areas he says can prove their worth by identifying inefficiencies companywide, and automating processes where appropriate.

It helps that they can also be leveraged to develop new, revenue-generating products and services, he said.

Kraft Heinz is working with AI across all areas: Starting with sales and marketing, and more recently in the supply chain and manufacturing, to identify inefficiencies and optimize performance. Instead of working with five or six variables in these processes, “AI can handle 20 variables to achieve optimization,” he said.

Likewise, it is testing robotics and automation in all areas of production, aiming to find process that are better — and more cheaply — handled by robots.

Tight budgeting forced the company to prioritize IT spending, shifting it away from funding legacy systems it no longer needed, he said.